Ana Siljak’s lecture covers her current project, which focuses on the recovery of the personalist thought of Nikolai Berdyaev and of the Russian personalism more broadly. In 1948 Time Magazine dubbed Berdyaev “one of the great religious philosophers of his time,” but Berdyaev is now rarely studied in the history of philosophy. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project will center on the explication of his personalism, and it will also reveal the wide-ranging influence of his thought, not just in Europe, but around the world. Berdyaev’s prescient criticism of modernity, including its anti-human aspects, will be set forth in the book, The Forgotten Dissident: The Personalism of Nikolai Berdyaev. The project also includes a digital archive of heretofore undiscovered letters and papers (released March 2025), a comprehensive, interactive bibliography of Berdyaev’s works in multiple languages (forthcoming May 2026).
Ana Siljak received her PhD in History from Harvard University and was a professor of history at Queen’s University until 2023. Her most recent publications include her edited volume entitled Religion and Secular Modernity in Russian Christianity, Judaism, and Atheism (Cornell University Press, 2024) and her edition of the translation of the correspondence of Nikolai Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain entitled An Exceptional Dialogue, 1925–1948: Nikolai Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025). Siljak’s first book, entitled Angel of Vengeance, on Russia’s first female terrorist, was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for narrative non-fiction and was named one of the top 100 books of the year by the Globe and Mail. She is currently a co-author of the textbook, Visions of the West, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2026. She has published articles and essays in the Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought; Journal of Modern History; Modern Intellectual History; and Canadian Slavonic Papers. She is currently completing her book on the personalist philosophy of Nikolai Berdiaev. She has contributed essays and book reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Mere Orthodoxy, and the Literary Review of Canada.
